Use the surgeon general post to help nation debate
biotechnology issues

http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
The Surgeon general may not be the most important job in government. But it can
be.

The office carries moral authority unlike any other. It is responsible for perhaps
the greatest public health success in American history, the reduction of a
deeply ingrained cultural habit - smoking - from 42 percent to 24 percent in a
single generation. (Its only competitor is Prohibition, which cut cirrhosis deaths
by half - but that it is a more complicated story.)

We've had great surgeons general like Luther Terry, who issued the landmark
smoking report in 1964. And we've had disastrous surgeons general like
Joycelyn Elders, who managed to trivialize the office. My personal favorite
was Julius Richmond, who served in the late '70s. I once asked him how he
enjoyed the job. "I love it," he replied, "but it does get tiring stamping all those
cigarette boxes."

When the current surgeon general steps down, the Bush administration will be
presented with an extraordinary opportunity. History will care little about the
budget battles of 2001. It will care greatly about the most significant event of
our time, the revolution in biology. It will ask where were we when the genie
left the bottle, and what we did about it.

For the last half-century our consciousness was dominated by atomic power.
Now, atomic power is good for three things: propelling submarines, generating
electricity and destroying the world. But its transformative power pales in
comparison to the power of biotechnology to alter the development, the
structure, the very consciousness of human beings.

Creating a thinking organism from nothing is an achievement of such staggering
complexity that it took 3 billion years of chemical tinkering. And yet now we
are learning how to insert ourselves at almost any point in the process to alter
and redirect it to our will.

It is a power as great as the domestication of fire. It will define the future as
nothing else. And the great decisions - about cloning and stem cells and other
forms of embryonic manipulation - will be made now. Who will make the case
on these questions if not the surgeon general?

The Washington buzz has a Texas physician and aerobics expert as a leading
candidate for the job. This is unfortunate. He is a worthy man, and urging
Americans to eat less meat and more vegetables is a worthy cause.

But the office can be far better used.

We need a surgeon general who understands the genetic revolution that is
upon us. And who can launch and direct a national debate on what to do
about it. We need a person like professor Leon Kass of the University of
Chicago.

A doctor by training, a philosopher by nature, he is one of those rare Socratic
beings who can get you to see what you have never seen - and get you to like
it. He has practiced medicine, published papers in biochemistry, written and
reflected on everything from Darwin to Babel, from cloning to euthanasia.

Thursday, a bill to ban human cloning went before Congress. Who can make
the case against asexual human reproduction when it seems to promise such
benefits to, say, infertile couples? Kass will be there testifying, having made
that difficult case ever since he published "The Wisdom of Repugnance: Why
We Should Ban the Cloning of Human Beings" four years ago in the The New
Republic.

The Netherlands, which for more than a decade tolerated euthanasia, has just
become the first country to legalize it. Who will make the case against the siren
song of "rational" death (by pointing out, for example, that large numbers of
elderly Dutch are killed without their consent by their doctors)? Kass has been
making the case for years.

Imbued with a deep sense of civility and an abiding respect for his
philosophical adversaries, Kass is uniquely suited to help the country think
through momentous questions that are no longer theoretical. And there is no
better place from which to do it than the office of surgeon
general.